The Role of Anticonformity in Social Collective Adaptation

Our society must continuously adapt to numerous, fast changing challenges, from pandemics to climate change and violent conflicts. This collective adaptation requires that at least some members of the society change their beliefs about the best courses of action. While this conflicts with the ubiquitous tendency to conform with others around us, it is important to sometimes turn in a different direction. This anticonformity of some members can sometimes be problematic, but at other times can help the collective to explore very different and perhaps better solutions than the current ones. Anticonformity is still not fully understood. It can assume many different forms and can have varying short and long term effects on beliefs of other members of a collective. These effects depend at least partially on the position of an anticonformist in the social network. Overall, anticonformity and its effects are a product of the underlying complex adaptive system of cognitions and social networks. To understand this system, we combine knowledge and methods from the cognitive and social sciences with those used by mathematicians and physicists. Building on theories from cognitive and social psychology, we develop agent based models of anticonformity in different social networks, and test the predictions of these models in group experiments with human participants. This will enable us to answer the following questions: What is the role of anticonformity in depolarizing polarized social groups? How can we describe the interplay between different types of anticonformity, conformity and cognitive dissonance? What is the cumulative effect of the network structure and the network location of anticonformists on collective adaptation? This project contributes to science and society in several ways. First, it will help us understand when and why anticonformity occurs in the process of collective adaptation. Second, we will elucidate different types of anticonformity, with some manifesting only on the level of private beliefs and others also on the level of expressed beliefs. Third, we will understand when and why anticonformity helps collective performance on different time and social scales. Finally, this project will break new ground in creating a truly transdisciplinary collaboration in developing experimentally driven and tested computational models of social and belief dynamics.

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